Decolonizing the Gaze: Bell Hooks, Cleo and the Act of Looking and Being Looked Upon
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Decolonizing the gaze: bell hooks, Cleo and the act of looking and being looked upon Deise Nunes 79 Decolonizing the gaze: bell hooks, Cleo and the I remember the first time I thought I could be act of looking and being looked upon is a commis- a performing artist. I was probably 13 years sioned text by Deise Nunes. Nunes has previously old. Watching the movie, Women on the written about decolonization for Black Box teater, Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, on TV with and has also moderated talks on this topic. my family, the men, upon the appearance of the Spanish performer Rossy de Palma, Deise Nunes has a Master in Theater Studies from exclaimed: “She is so ugly!” I was fascinated Universitet i Oslo, and works as an artistic project by Rossy de Palma: her dark hair, straight, developer, producer, playwright and writer. She is shiny, with a charming fringe. Her big eyes Artistic Director of Golden Mirrors Arts Norway. between green and brown, her presence Nunes was a project developer at Nordic Black eating poisoned gazpacho. Her red outfit. In Theater, and founder and project manager of my teenage innocence, I thought: ‘The boys ACTS laboratory for performance practices. She at school call me ugly. Well, if an ugly girl can was a member of the academic committee for be on that film, wearing that red outfit, maybe theater in the Norwegian Arts Council 2016–2018, I can grow up to be an actress like Rossy de is a council member of the Norwegian Children’s Palma!’ Book Institute 2016–2020 and expert in the Nordic Culture Fund 2019–2021. Nunes is also a member In the 1980s in Brazil, black women played roles of the Artistic Council at Kloden Theater. mainly as slaves and maids in soap operas. At that point in my life, I had never been to the theatre. Colonial and patriarchal mentality, through pictorial narratives of white supremacy and the normalized male gaze, can explain my 13-year old self identify with a white European woman who was labeled ‘ugly’ in the eyes of men. Still, I am grateful to Rossy de Palma for having been there, exactly then. Years later I would realize that seeking lib- eration while belonging to the African diaspora would entail a life-long process to decolonize my mind and my life, and also as an arts practitioner. 81 Although deeply personal, such a process is bell hooks: looking as agency inherently a shared one. bell hooks (without capitalization) is the pen name The urge to establish a conversation about of the American feminist, Gloria Jean Watkins. For decolonization in the arts has reached Norway more than four decades, hooks has been a fierce relatively late. The issue of decolonization is in cultural critic and one of the most relevant black itself not new in other parts of Western Europe and feminist thinkers of our time. Her question: “…but has been exhaustively debated, for instance, by what about the black female body?” has perme- French and British academia. ated discussions on empowerment connected to Even though we know that both black men popular cultural phenomena such as Beyoncé’s and women have been dehumanized as colonized album, Lemonade (2016), and the black female subjects, there is a special position for women of presence in the American audio-visual industry. In color in the colonial discourse: The black female her writings and speeches, hooks discusses who is body is designated as a carrier of the seeds of allowed agency in arts and culture. colonial subjugation, caretaker and servant of Using a language that supports her assertion its children. At the same time, the experiences that feminism is for everyone, bell hooks discusses of black female and non-binary people have themes that reach beyond theory, reverberating in been either ignored or silenced. Therefore, the the lives of black women. intersection of gender-race deserves a specific In her essay The Oppositional Gaze: Black approach from a decolonizing perspective, in Female Spectators, bell hooks conceptualizes gaze order to elaborate patriarchy as a paradigm for the as power, dialoguing with the thoughts of Michel construction of all aspects of Western domination Foucault and coining the idea of oppositional gaze. and expansion. The concept is built upon ‘looking-as-agency,’ a The present essay is about collective decol- political act happening within, and in resistance to, onizing experiences through the spectatorship of unbalanced power structures reflected in mov- audio-visual arts, from a black feminist perspective. ie-making and movie-going. In the following, I intend to examine part of the Early in her life, hooks understood that looking theories of oppositional gaze by the American could be dangerous. As a girl, she was often pun- feminist, bell hooks. ished or reprimanded for staring at people, things Through this paradigm of the black condition, or situations. Later in her life, as a student, she I intend to shed light on the liberating potential learned how enslaved black people were severely performing arts can have for its spectators. punished for looking. The discovery of this fact 82 83 made hooks aware of the traumatic roots associ- ritual, film or a football match, is attended by ated with the feelings of curiosity that fed her gaze. individuals, each with their own account of the Through her study of the works of Michel Foucault, received experience. hooks realized that the structure of oppression Taking this idea into bell hooks’ realm, women imposed on black people, was again reproduced of color are interesting spectators. Firstly, because by those same individuals when exercising par- their bodies are rarely present as doers in the enthood. Such a mechanism is enabled by means performance – when they do, their representation of recurrent and perpetuated control strategies. often rests upon a specific stereotypical image. In this context of uneven power relations, looking Secondly, because their experiences as viewers is constructed as a privilege, a potential act of are rarely described or discussed. empowerment and resistance. Observing awakens the thought, the potential- Theatre, from the old Greek term theatron, ity of (self-)reflection, study, analysis, scrutiny and from theasthai, means “to behold”, “to view”, and criticism. It creates awareness. Looking has, in the from thea, “act of seeing”. Knowing that, in ancient simple act of focusing, the seed to sharing ideas Greece, nether women nor enslaved subjects were and practices that eventually point to the liberation allowed to go to established theatre festivals, we of oppressed individuals. Looking then, becomes can ask: Which gazes are we talking about when a defiant challenge to an establishment that was referring to spectatorship? Who is allowed to look created to exclude ‘other’ gazes. But isn’t it what at what? we see, in combination with what we have seen, Often, artists talk about “engaging the audi- that forms the gaze? ence (s)” as a goal for their works. But who is this hook’s studies on cinema and black movie- mythical entity, “the audience”? goers from an American filmatic-historical per- My avant-garde, European theatre education spective offer us important parallels with other through Odin Teatret in Denmark always takes art forms. In this context, the novel, The Bluest me back to Eugenio Barba’s theatre anthropology, Eye (1970), by the American writer Toni Morrison even if at some point I have also to recognize that is an important reference. In the book, set in the libertarian theatre theory may fall short when 1940’s, a poor, working woman of color, Miss it comes to the intersections of race-gender. Pauline, offers an account of her experience in the However, theatre anthropology doesn’t use the movies. Miss Pauline speaks about the pleasure term ‘audience,’ it deals rather with ‘spectators.’ she feels when watching romantic stories. Having The performative event, be it theatre, performance, no black characters to identify with, Miss Pauline 84 85 unconsciously projects herself as the white female Cleo’s gaze character. This oppositional gaze was important for me in my hooks reference to Miss Pauline makes me process of reflection during a recent, remarkable think of my 13-year old me, and other black girls, experience of spectatorship: Alfonso Cuaron’s to whom the experience of spectatorship still acclaimed movie, Roma (2018). The movie invites does not reflect, or even acknowledge, our own the spectator, through stunning black and white existence. photography, to look into the life of Cleo, a house- Timely, hooks points to other black wom- keeper of indigenous origin in a political uneasy en’s experiences of spectatorship, for instance, Mexico City in 1971. Cleo devotes her long days accounts of those who consciously avoid identifi- to the family who employ her: a couple, their four cation, or ‘looking too deep.’ She points to her own children and the maternal grandmother. deep disappointment when faced with the young In the beginning of the action, the father of the mixed-race character in the 1959 movie Imitation family goes on a trip, and later on we realize that of Life. Watching the character’s struggle to ‘pass he has left the family to be with another woman, as white,’ hooks feels such a deep sorrow, that she leaving his wife alone with her mother, the children, stops going to the movies. the dogs, two maids, a driver and a car that is too When, some time later, she goes back to this big for the house’s garage. The storyline seems form of entertainment, it is with a new gaze: the almost surgically focused on Cleo’s daily tasks oppositional gaze.